26 November 2010

It's hard being a walk-in party of ten on a Friday night. You might as well all wear matching signs that say "Sucker." The fact is, any restaurant worth sitting down at will be booked solid on a Saturday night; the ones that are not are the strugglers and failers, whose general sad desperation is reliably reflected in that of the waitstaff, who will rob you blind without blinking.

But in Madrid that is the situation we found ourselves in. My friend D and I had a few tip-offs for chaotic tapas bars, but everyone (notably his wife / my friend E, the reason we were all in Madrid in the first place) preferred to sit down after a hard days' museum viewing. For twenty minutes all ten of us ricocheted around Calle Cava Baja, rejecting restaurant after restaurant for being either too slammed or too disturbingly calm. Finally D made an admirable well-intentioned capital-dee Decision and convinced everyone to wait still longer for a half-promised table at a what was quite plainly a sinister rip-off joint for old-school geezers.*

Everyone but me. Immune to shame, I told everyone I'd return when the table was ready and I popped off solo to revisit one of the recommended manic tapas bars we'd passed earlier, Taberna Tempranillo.

I was tired too, but bad restaurants, even when calm and empty, dice my nerves into bacon bits. Conversely, when I enter a place like Taberna Tempranillo - which on a Friday night at 10:30pm was fire-hazardously packed, a melée of shoulders and elbows - I nod approvingly at the all-Spanish wine list and the whole room becomes a cushion (- for this idea I support, that wine and cuisine and dining are cultural expressions, not just fuel and depressants and social transactions you pay for). So the two glasses of wine I splashed down there among crowing strangers were extremely restorative, for me.

Only one was any good, admittedly. My Spanish is nil, so I was unable to ascertain before ordering whether a 2009 Enrique Mendoza Moscatel listed along with the dry whites glasses was off-dry, as I'd hoped, or flabby and cloying, as was the reality. I had better luck with the first glass, a 2009 Rafael Palacios Valdeorras "Louro do Bolo," steel-fermented old-vine Godello.

Despite some overchilling on the Taberna's part, the wine struck a very nice cucumber / mineral / white pepper accord. While I was drinking it, three ladies beside me attempted to communicate something to me; they kept saying "La Mancha" - from which I presumed they wanted me to drink wines from La Mancha, Spain. Either that, or it was some kind of slang that I do not know. (La Mancha? La Mancha. Poison? La Mancha.) The "Louro do Bolo" was from Galicia, northern Spain, not La Mancha. I was happy when the three ladies left; they were weirding me out.

I chewed on some of the very nice evenly-fatted cured meats Taberna Tempranillo gives you with each wine glass, I crunched down some of those little oyster-crackery picos, and after a few sips of the aforementioned disappointing Moscatel, I left to rejoin my friends, who in their general excellence were not, you know, really annoyed with me for wandering off.

*I spent a year living in Boston's North End and can spot these places a mile-off. Thick wood siding, waiters in frayed ties, the red eyes of the manager in the white blazer who brings you the oversized wine list... These places are someone's uncle's favorite hangout; they have a picture of the former mayor on the wall; they attract minor sports stars for some reason.

4 comments:

as far as i remember, my clothes were mostly clean that evening. no stains. reeked of smoke, but that is unavoidable there. i don't think that was what they were getting at... thanks for reading, through, and for the translation!

My name is Blanka, Picture Researcher at GuidePal – one of the world’s leading travel apps. We provide free city guides for more than 60 destinations, and have more than 4 million downloads.

I came across your webpage and I saw that you had some nice photos of El Tempranillo. At the moment we are working on our Madrid guide, but I am missing some photos, among them El Tempranillo. Perhaps you would like to share your photos with us - we will of course credit you properly.

I’d be thrilled if we could collaborate - if this sounds interesting I can give you some more info.